To the edge of virtual reality and back again

Oh look quest giver … please click yes to go kill 10 rats

Ok is it me or has questing remained the least explored medium in mmo’s as opposed the advanced made in other areas of mmo design, graphics, travel routes, voice etc. I remember back in the dark days of my youth playing pc games and recieving quests exactly the same way as most mmo’s do now, well with the exception of yellow glowy questions marks hovering over the quest givers heads. Quests design seems to stalling out with one concept of quest trees. Talk to quest giver, read paragraph, click yes button, read next paragraph, click next, do you accept quest, click yes and off you go on your merry little way…..

Can someone please explain to me then why this is still the standard ? is it to much to ask to have multiple responses to the paragraphs leading to maybe something like a coversation … maybe the responses could lead to alternative quest lines from the same quest giver. Is it to much to ask …. are we really that lazy to not care to read the quest dialogue ? or is that due to the current way quests are given … are designers just taking a short cut as multiple quest lines and dialogues is just to much bother, time intensive.

I know for one thing i would be happy camper if my response to quest givers conversations could lead to dififernt quest lines, certainly would lend a bit to roleplayer you character … anyone else think that this is an area that could really do with some improvement ? any suggestions ? … or am i just delusional

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EQ2 has a few quest givers that give multiple quests depending on which branch you select. Also, they have conversation branches that lead to you not accepting the quest, but you don’t really know that until you select it (you can always go back and restart the conversation though.) So far, I’ve seen nothing that irreversibly causes you to fail a quest, or to not be able to get a quest.

But the fact you have a conversation tree to go through in the first place is one of the reasons I find EQ2 more compelling than WOW where you just get a boring little jumble of flavor text, the objective (kill 10 murloks), and an OK button.

Some of the missions in Tabula Rasa gives different paths and missions depending ont he choices you make.
City of Villains has some cases where you can make a choice, but there are really not any consequences other than some differences in rewards.

I think a major problem here is time and resources for the development. If you have different paths then you have many slightly different stories that should be told and more work to write these, while a character will typically take one of the paths only. So there is more content to be devleoped but may not be perceived to be more by a player, unless they play alts that will try all different paths.

SO the extent to which different paths will be available is probably going to be limited. At least until they might include player-generated content into the picture.

“Questions is do we really read the quest dialogue or just click through to see what they want to do …”

Both, I think. LoTRO is a good example where both are very much present. The storyline quests are a blast – and it’s been my experience that you don’t need to sit and read the text before clicking ‘Accept’ in order to know what you need to do most of the time, the quest progression keeps you involved in what is going on, and does a good job of leading you to what you need to do next.

Now, the non-storyline quests? Yeah, I couldn’t tell you why the dwarf wanted me to get his axe off of a corpse to the east, and kill 10 spiders on my way. I just know that I got an experience boost for doing it.

I think they should be classified differently, there are actual “Quests” and then there is “Directed Grinding”.

I think game designers are better learning how to immerse their players in quests when they want to (Consider the new player zones/quests from WoW at launch, and with TBC) – but in order to keep the game interesting (achievements in the form of levels, money, items) and not seem trivial (if everyone can get to level 50 in a day – what’s the point?) they put in the quests where the dialog is trivial, to keep it from feeling like the grind-fest that was Everquest. Don’t get me wrong, I loved EQ, but ask any player how you leveled in EQ and their answer would almost certainly be “grinding”. Ask any player how you level in WoW, and they’ll probably answer “questing” – even though that questing is grinding of a different sort.

No, of course most people skip them. That’s because most of them aren’t worth reading. “Fetch my slippers,” says the wizard. Whatever. I want XP. And I don’t get XP from reading comprehension.

I think we have a cause of quantity over quality these days. (Which is an improvement over what was before which was a lack of both.) There are some nice quests in EQ2 but they are few and far between. I tried LOTRO and liked the intro missions but quit trying after that because it turned into the same old, same old grind.

I think quests should be rare in a game and mean something when you have one. Devs should implement other grindy mechanisms to let you level up besides meaningless quests, like repeatable missions protecting cities/outposts, escorting NPCs between areas, etc.

Lars expressed my views exactly. Every game is so focused on quests for leveling these days and I don’t enjoy it at all. When the quests are rare, then I take the time to actually read them and get more enjoyment out of doing them. Otherwise, I just click through them and don’t bother to read.

If I have to do a multitude of quests, I’d love to see something a bit more innovative as Pixie suggested. There’s got to be some viable alternatives to the current standard. Honestly, all these quests just drive me nuts.

I tend to read the mission texts most of the time, at least the first time I do a mission. However, in a number of cases it is just directed grinding and the story is thin and uninspiring, at least when there are a lot of missions in the game.

But there are also some fairly nice stories out there. The problem is that you not directly see which missions are which in most cases. They could do with some marker for “grind” missions as well as “story” missions. But then people would perhaps have to admit how much is actually grind. On the other hand they might get more readers for the stories that they have actaully put some effort into.

In City of Heroes/Villains there are the newspaper/police band missions, which essentially are grind missions. They are fairly short in duration, they are often easier than story arc missions and thus more efficient if you want to grind xp than doing the story oriented missions.
For the story arc missions, lots of story details comes as “clues”, one has to make an active effort to go look at it and read it during the missions. A lot of people probably miss the info given here, which is unfortunate. At least if one are actually interested in a story… Some of newer story arcs are more visual in their nature when it comes to story telling though.

On the topic of mission grinding I must say I do like the Tabula Rasa environment, since I think it does a decent job of encouraging to engage in the “war effort” as opposed to just run and do the missions.
I have been playing multiple short sessions where I have just jumped in to defend or re-take a control point or just wander around exploring, without specifically trying to do any missions.

Think you got it Sente, we need a way to seperate the mission quests (story) from the grind quests. Coh/Cov have a great way of doing, so does vanguard with the missive boards.
As long grind quests are short and maybe promote some exploration at the same time then gind questing would not be to bad. Atleast that way you get to know which quest you need to read and not read.

Now if these story quets were multi treed and offer maybe 3 or 4 paths to what you need to be doing during that quest then we have a winner. You could have a good tree (save the princess from a kidnapper), evil option to kidnap the princess and nuetral quest line follow the kidnapper to find out who employeers is ….

Meh, most players just skip reading regardless of whether you put options in front of them or not. In the end, it is still asking you to do some mundane task. I would rather just the game admit that I won’t read the text unless I get stuck and give me the objective. Personally, I could do without even flavor text and quest givers. Just give me the objective to do, or make it apparent what I should be doing in certain situations and I’ll decide whether to do something or not.